Sanders is dominating all other candidates among small donors, which
could give him a marked advantage as the primary continues. Almost
three-quarters of his haul this quarter came from donors giving $200 or
less, and the campaign told the Huffington Post
that only 270 of his nearly 700,000 donors—less than half of 1
percent—have given the maximum individual contribution of $2,700 for the
primary. That means that Sanders can go back to his donor base
repeatedly as the race progresses.

Only 17 percent of Clinton’s contributions were from small donors. According to Politico,
more than half of her take last quarter was from donors who are now
maxed out and can’t give again until the general election gets underway.

They are the country’s gloom-and-doom generation of
millennials — and they have found a gloom-and-doom candidate to love in
the 2016 presidential election: Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the
democratic socialist who has attracted a stream of young people to his
rallies in numbers unmatched by any other candidate from either party.

The
campaign is aiming to match President Obama’s historic performance
among this group of voters in 2008. Already, in polls in key nominating
states, Sanders is outperforming Hillary Rodham Clinton, in some cases
by lopsided margins, among young voters.

(Aside: Magazines should stop writing about generational cohorts as if they think and act with one mind. Just a few years ago, we were told Millennials were the "optimistic generation," supposedly less cynical and misanthropic than their grumpy Gen-X predecessors. Now they are all about "gloom and doom." Maybe one day we'll figure out what a disservice we do to paint every person in an age range with one brush. But first we'll have to kill all the advertisers.)

“Once you get out of Washington ‘conservative’ can mean all sorts of
different things. Voters are often left of center on some issues and
right of center on others. So someone like Trump or Sanders who talks
about themselves in a way that doesn’t fit into a pre-ordained box could
be appealing to a lot of people,” says Chris Ellis, a political science
professor at Bucknell University.

In some cases, longtime
Republican voters who have decided to support Sanders, like MacMillan,
are rethinking their political affiliation entirely. (“I’m inclined to
say I might stay with the Democratic Party because the Republican Party
has changed and it’s not the way it used to be,” MacMillan says.) Far
from claiming to have experienced a political conversion, other
Republicans argue that Sanders actually embodies conservative values.

“When
I think of true conservative values I think of Teddy Roosevelt who
earned a reputation as a trust-buster,” says Jeff DeFelice, a
38-year-old registered Republican voter living in Florida. “Now
look at Bernie. He’s the only one willing to stand up to the big banks.
The big banks control an obscene amount of wealth in this country and
he wants to go after them.” If Sanders looks like “a viable candidate”
by the time the primary rolls around, DeFelice says he’ll switch his
party affiliation to vote for the senator.

Sanders’s promise to wrest power away from Wall Street and return it to the American middle class taps into the same vein of populist anger that fueled the rise of the Tea Party. It’s also a message that resonates with mainstream Republicans and Democrats. Sixty-two percent of Republicans, for example, believe that large corporations wield too much influence on American politics, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll conducted in May.

So Bernie is well liked, is funded by many small donors, and has broad bi-partisan appeal to the very same anxieties currently dominating the field in the Republican primaries. (The Republicans, unlike the Democrats, have chosen to actually have debates and get attention so they're the default barometer for the national mood.)

Fully 83 percent of Democrats have a favorable impression of
Clinton, compared with 54 percent for Sanders. And despite Sanders's
ability to energize the Democratic base -- as shown by huge crowds
turning out to see him -- Clinton's edge is almost as large on
intensity; 47 percent see Clinton in a "strongly favorable" light,
compared with 22 percent for Sanders. So while more than half of
Democrats who like Clinton feel strongly, less than half of those who
like Sanders feel that way.

Which is funny because, according to the polling, anyway, Clinton is the Democrat more likely to lose the general election.

Clinton boasts no advantage over Sanders among the public overall,
however. Clinton's ratings with all Americans are underwater, at
46 percent favorable and 51 percent unfavorable, while Sanders's
reviews are narrowly positive (40-38 favorable-unfavorable).

Clinton
is worse off among political independents. Thirty-nine percent rate her
favorably and 57 percent unfavorably, while Sanders again receives a
slightly positive favorable-unfavorable split -- 42-38.